Title Update 14 12/4/2018 [MEGA]

We are excited to announce Title Update 14 is here! Can you prove you are the best in the Grand Arena? Unlike Squad and Fleet Arena, you will now be able to fight anyone in the game in an 8-player struggle to earn some awesome prizes! Here you can compete against players of a similar Galactic power from around the world . We’re kicking off Season 0 with a special Exhibition event that starts soon, so make sure to get the latest update and get ready to play!

In the meantime, why not customize your profile to show off your top achievement and display your favorite Star Wars character as your portrait?

Last but not least, in addition to fixing numerous bug and making many improvements, we’re also debuting the most requested quality-of-life feature: Change your payout time! Choose which time zone up to two times a year. Check out our timezone calculator in-game to see which timezone fits your ideal play time.

Read on to find out more about the Grand Arena and rest of today's update

PATCH NOTES:

Grand Arena

Portraits

Time Settings

See below for a detailed breakdown of the changes!

PATCH DETAILS:GRAND ARENA
Get ready for Grand Arena, the ultimate test of skill!

Unlock: Grand Arena is a new table that unlocks at level 85. Similar to other timed features, a shortcut will display on the cantina home’s HUD when a player can participate in a Grand Arena event.

Matchmaking: Leveraging the new Matchmaking changes, players are placed into a group of 8 opponents that have similar collections so that all players have fun and challenging fights throughout the entire Grand Arena. Once players are in a group, matchmaking pairs players with a similar number of wins rising the highest skill players to the top of the group.

Grouping Edge Cases: In the instance that the number of participating players is not divisible by 8, we create 8 person groups starting with the strongest collections to the weakest collections. The final two groups are then split such that both groups have 4 or more players. For example, if there are 9 players between the final 2 groups, they will have 5 and 4 players respectively.

Byes: In the instance of an odd number of players in a group, one player will receive a bye each round. Matchmaking continues to try to match players based on wins, but that will not always be possible.

Schedule: Each Grand Arena event is a week-long event that consists of a series of 3 rounds against different opponents. There are seven 24 hour phases: Join, Set Defense (Opponent 1), Attack (Opponent 1), Set Defense (Opponent 2), Attack (Opponent 2), Set Defense (Opponent 3), Attack (Opponent 3)

At the end of the join period, a snapshot is taken of the players collection that will be used throughout the length of the event. This means that further improvements to units including changing Mods will not affect the Grand Arena event for any of the rounds.

Gameplay: Grand Arena is meant to be the ultimate test of skill, so we don’t have any plans currently to have combat bonuses. That said there are a variety of events including a differing number of territories and some events that have 3 unit squads.

Scaling Defensive Squads/Fleets: To provide a fun experience for all players, the number of defensive squads/fleets scales based on the GP of the lowest player in the group.

Banners: Similar to Territory Wars, banners are earned for setting defenses, successful attacks, and conquering a territory. The one new aspect is that Ties are no longer possible. We’ve taken steps to both mitigate ties and remove them entirely.

Existing ways to earn banners in Territory Wars will also exist in Grand Arena. This includes # of attempts, surviving units, and unslotted units. However the value of using unslotted units has been increased to emphasize the risk/reward of using an undersized party.

Full Health/Protection: We have added two more criteria to further mitigate ties. An additional banner is earned for each unit at full protection and another banner for each unit at full health. This further identifies not only that the squad/fleet won, but how well it won. Bonus protection does not count and units that enter battle with no protection will automatically earn the protection bonus (ex. Nihilus lead, and low gear level units)

Tiebreakers: In the rare occasion of the event ending with tied banners, the player with the higher GP will win. In the extremely rare chance of equal Banners and equal GP, a random player wins.

No changes have been made to Territory Wars at this time.

Auto Deploy: To help players that forgot to set defensive squads during one of the setup phases, the squads/fleets set on a territory in a previous round will auto-deploy if no squad/fleets were deployed that round and squads/fleets had been deployed in a previous round.

Rewards: There are many opportunities for Rewards throughout the event including:

Small rewards for every squad that is defeated

Rewards based on winning/losing a round

Event Rank based Rewards (number of wins)

Season 0 Exhibition Event: Our initial event(s) will be 1 round and a group of only 2 opponents to give players a chance to get used to Grand Arena.

PORTRAITS
Portraits is a new feature that lets you show off your accomplishments and express yourself by placing an image next to your name throughout the game. For example you can unlock the Darth Vader portrait for accomplishing the “Sith Master” Prestigious Quest. New Prestigious Quests have been created and some existing quests have been updated to award portraits and new titles.

Many of the existing titles will now have a portrait associated with it. Players that have already earned the title will have the portrait automatically unlocked. (The one exception is the rank 1 in Raids portraits will only unlock for players that have earned rank 1 in the past 6 months)

In addition, Titles will also appear next to your player name throughout the game.

TIME SETTINGS
One of the most common requests is to change the time of the squad/fleet arena payouts or change when daily activities reset. Many players have found that they are not available to battle near their current arena payout time or that it was changed due to daylight saving time and they’d like it to be a consistent time. Time settings allow players to change these times twice a year to whatever they find to be the most convenient for them.

The following are examples of times that are altered when the daily activity reset time is changed:

Replies

Q: Why don't I have all the cool features from the update?!?A: The update is currently rolling out across Android servers. iOS will start rolling out this afternoon. We will force an update tomorrow but until then you may not see the update depending on which device or server you connect to. Later this afternoon you should be able to go to your respective app stores and manually download if you have not received it already

Q: Why can I complete the Grand Arena Quest before Grand Arena starts?A: We have found a bug in the Grand Arena Quest that allows players to complete it early. We are working on a hotfix to resolve this shortly.

Q: Is Sion's taunt broken after this update?A: No, don't forget about Traya's Unique! She cleanses debuff from allied Sith at the start of their turn. At the same time, an enemy Sion trigger's his Taunt as that debuff is being cleansed.

Q: Will the Rewards change for future Grand Arena Events?A: Yes, a typical grand arena will take place over several days, and will have commensurate rewards. This first one lined up to start on 12/6 is a single round of the event and therefore reflects the effort. We'll reveal more info around the full reward structure later this week, but we're keen to see how the first exhibition game goes later this week.

You guys forgot guild tag again...
Name, guild, title. That's it.
And finally I hear the word season.
Hope for seasonal rewards and an overall point ranking at the end off the season +implementing seasons to TW too.

@CG_SBCrumb The update notes seem to suggest that some features (Portraits, timezone change ect) should be live following the update, however having updated, I am not seeing them in game. Is that an issue on your end, or did I just miss something in the text?

@CG_SBCrumb The update notes seem to suggest that some features (Portraits, timezone change ect) should be live following the update, however having updated, I am not seeing them in game. Is that an issue on your end, or did I just miss something in the text?

@CG_SBCrumb The update notes seem to suggest that some features (Portraits, timezone change ect) should be live following the update, however having updated, I am not seeing them in game. Is that an issue on your end, or did I just miss something in the text?

This will require a game update through the app store later today

Ah, OK. My client forced a restart, and I had assumed it was the update, but perhaps it was just having some kind of ill-timed meltdown

@CG_SBCrumb The update notes seem to suggest that some features (Portraits, timezone change ect) should be live following the update, however having updated, I am not seeing them in game. Is that an issue on your end, or did I just miss something in the text?

As Sandurz mentioned, it's coming! The update will take some time to all roll out to all the servers.

1. Hope exhibition type Grand Arena is also a regular thing (Time span of 2 days as opposed to 1 week)
2. Portraits is cool. I hope community can suggest portraits too instead of limited to using in-game art as portraits

The notes say both GA matchmaking will be made on similar GPs and similar collections. Which one will it be based on, is it a more complex algorithm than just aligning GPs? This has been my qualm from the beginning it was announced and now I'm even more worried.

The notes say both GA matchmaking will be made on similar GPs and similar collections. Which one will it be based on, is it a more complex algorithm than just aligning GPs? This has been my qualm from the beginning it was announced and now I'm even more worried.

First you match with GP and then you collect winning points. I guess this points will reorientade the match more in favor how much battles you won. That at least would make the most sense for me. If you suck in your GP league you get in the losing breaket and may win.

@CG_SBCrumb I'm a guild leader, and we start the sith raid (t6) at 12AM my time, meaning it is also the time where the 5 attempts are reset. So if I change my timezone to let's say 3 hours later (3h into the future), will the characters/attempts still reset at the old time (12AM) for the guild, or will it change to 3AM?

The notes say both GA matchmaking will be made on similar GPs and similar collections. Which one will it be based on, is it a more complex algorithm than just aligning GPs? This has been my qualm from the beginning it was announced and now I'm even more worried.

First you match with GP and then you collect winning points. I guess this points will reorientade the match more in favor how much battles you won. That at least would make the most sense for me. If you suck in your GP league you get in the losing breaket and may win.

@No_Try don't know if we will ever know the truth of it but the most recent TW I looked around to see as many results of the DSR guild comparison bot as I could find and the parameters that seemed most similar across all of them seemed to be GP, number of zetas, number of g11 and number of g12. (active GP in the case of guilds and only including characters above 6000 presumably).

There were still occasional miss matches of those values but it seemed mostly consistent. By the looks of things specific characters (Traya and Revan) and numbers of mods above a certain speed were still often completely different.

So seems like if you are a collector that has loads of lvl 85 g7 characters you shouldn't be too badly effected if it matches you to someone with a similar number of g11 and g12.

But if you don't have a strong PVP setup in terms of fast mods and OP characters maybe you will see difficult match ups.

Out of 8 people though it's unlikely more than 3 will have traya and revan though so you should still be able win a couple each week hopefully!

@CG_SBCrumb I'm a guild leader, and we start the sith raid (t6) at 12AM my time, meaning it is also the time where the 5 attempts are reset. So if I change my timezone to let's say 3 hours later (3h into the future), will the characters/attempts still reset at the old time (12AM) for the guild, or will it change to 3AM?

Changing your timezone as the Guild Leader will not impact your Guild's reset time

The notes say both GA matchmaking will be made on similar GPs and similar collections. Which one will it be based on, is it a more complex algorithm than just aligning GPs? This has been my qualm from the beginning it was announced and now I'm even more worried.

First you match with GP and then you collect winning points. I guess this points will reorientade the match more in favor how much battles you won. That at least would make the most sense for me. If you suck in your GP league you get in the losing breaket and may win.

The note is unclear on if it's purely based on GP or not.

Your group of 8 will be based on GP and then who you face (after the first round) is determined by your win/loss record within that group. For example, everyone in your group has around 1mil GP but you lose your first round, you will then mostly go up against other players who lost their first round.